Observance

A year into living in Sydney away from friends and family everything collapsed. I'd made a film about 3 years earlier which got me some work in the interim but I quickly found myself unemployed, desperate and far from home. Project after project kept falling apart and I came to realise that I'd been blind in my pursuit of success, chasing ideas amounting to nothing more than far-fetched dreams.

One night in November 2012, I can't remember the day exactly, another project had crumbled and I laid in bed sodden in this latest failure. Somewhere between consciousness and slumber an image entered my mind: a man sat alone in darkness, peering through a camera at a woman across the street. He doesn't know who she is but he cannot look away, needing to obsessively monitor her every move from the shadows.

As one image faded another came: the man reviews the photographs that he's taken of this woman, discovering a reflection in the glass of one of her windows. The reflection is of his own apartment. The image shows that in the window of his kitchen a threatening outline of a human figure stands. In the shadows he is not alone.

The next morning I told my friend Josh and we started writing.

For a month and a half we wandered the streets of Rozelle and Balmain at night, exploring and scribbling down notes. We decided to shoot in early January and on our own steam, pulling every favour we could.

I’m still amazed by the dedication and fine work of the cast and crew. I was under-prepared, having to shoot the entire thing in 11 days with no money and during the worst heatwave Sydney had ever experienced. Josh and I both averaged about two hours sleep per night. It wasn't long before the madness hung over the set like an invisible gas, slowly poisoning our sanity.

It's an odd thing when the film you are making starts to resemble the life that you are living. Especially when you're making a horror film. Each time I watch it I can feel a certain sense of turmoil and anxiety percolating through the layers of the story, from Lindsay's performance as the man in darkness to his dreams of waves beating against rocky cliffs.

Observance is an experience birthed from a desire to explore my inability to control my own future. As I sank further into it's world I began to perceive life as though it were a race towards a distant light. A cold presence taunting me into oblivion.

The trauma sits like a spectre in the night. As it stares down at me in my sleep I feel almost content knowing that these conspirators, whether they exist in reality or in my mind, will never let me go.

Joseph Sims-Dennett